Cyberspace is cool. It is large and it has all sorts of different environments one can explore. There are a lot of nice people out there, too, but, at the same time, there are an inordinate number of not nice people inhabiting this space. This is because, for the most part, one can be anonymous out here. Look at me, for example: I have no reason for this particular nom de computer other than not wanting to give a potential creep any sort of entré into my life. In personal emails with individuals, I would be happy to include my real name, but I don't leave it lying around out here.

Earlier this week, my primary email address, which ends with @ix.netcom.com was, along with everybody else who has that address to the right of the "@" sign, had problems with my email. (Couldn't receive or send: both POP and SMTP servers were experiencing "problems".) So, I send out an email from a secondary address to all my family and important contacts telling them to use this other address until the problem is corrected. Now, this secondary account is one of my "anonymous" accounts: begins with "ezv". So, my idiot nephew (who is 15) writes back "Do I know you?" ( he hadn't a clue that his old uncle actually had an alias out there.) What was he thinking? I reamed him a new asshole when I got his reply. Don't ever, I told him, reply to an email from somebody you don't know. If nothing else, they'll probably sell your email address to some slimy spam artis. and that is the best outcome you can expect (I sold his address--he should start getting the porn, mortgage refi ads, credit repair ads, work at home ads, that guy from Nigeria within a few days.) I told him that he didn't even want to imagine the worst possible outcome.

I have been stressed recently. Money sucks...or rather, not having any sucks...especially when you had it and then it all went away. And it is my own damn fault. I thought I could play with the big kids on The Street, and, instead, they beat me up and took away my lunch money. So, now, being uncomfortably past the half century mark, I find that I have to go out and *shudder* work again. Not that losing a lot of money wasn't hard work: it was. It consumed my days and nights for the better part of 2 1/2 years. Of course, my real bitch is that, once again, I tried to do something without enough capital. (I've done that before...) If I had started out with about 25% more capital, I'd have survived the learning curve and would still be in the game. But I didn't, and it is not very productive to play the "what if" game...so I won't anymore.

Starting Monday, I put on a suit and go job hunting for at least a couple hours a day. It sucks, but that is what one has to do...

So, today I learned that this looks different between browsers. I use Netscape and Opera as my two primary browsers, and I must say that Opera does not display this site in anywhere near the same manner as Netscape. I also learned how to get stuff that no longer appears on my active posts page here in Free Blogger.

This old dog can learn new tricks, it seems...

I am, among other things, a new (well, six months worth of new) grandparent. Six months ago, I was not at all psychologically ready to be ?Granddad?. Grandfathers were people like my grandfather(s). Namely, men who were slightly older than God and who were somewhat remote personages. Well, I still marvel at how such a young man as myself could arrive at the gates of grandparentdom, but I vow that, having arrived, I will not be this remote, august figure I remember from my youth.

I have much more to say about Dulce, but that will have to wait until later?gotta run right now?

The Politics of Pessimism

For some strange reason, business leaders seem to turn towards the Republicans for political leadership when the empirical evidence of the past century seems to indicate that Republicans are bad for the economy and Democrats are good for it. Virtually every Republican president since, and including, Hoover (Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush and Bush) has managed to make a hash of the national economy. One of the reasons for this economic ineptitude could be that Republicans are basically pessimists who place self-interest above anything else. The American President who really initiated the great tech boom of the last 30 years was John Kennedy. However, as the fruits of the seeds he sowed back in 1960 began to truly burst forth in the latter half of the 1990s, the conservatives, lead by George Bush, began vigorously to attack the idea that this expansion was sustainable. Their efforts have become a self-fulfilling prophecy, and we will not get out from underneath this until we replace our political leaders in Washington.

The Republican record with the economy has not bee a good one. Beginning with Hoover, who presided over the Crash of 1929 and the beginning of the Great Depression of the 1930s, only Eisenhower escaped a strong recession under his leadership. Eisenhower can be seen as an anomaly since he was not a strong Republican: rather, he was primarily a hands-off president who had the economic momentum left over from the industrial expansion of World War II and the continuing needs of the Cold War to prop up the economy. The Nixon/Ford presidency inherited the Vietnam War, but managed to still hash up the economy further. Under their watch we had the first Energy Crisis and the introduction of the term “stag-flation” to the lexicon. Ronald Reagan, in his single-minded pursuit of the destruction of the “Evil Empire” came very close to spending the country into penury. It is not unrelated that, under his watch, the stock market experienced in October of 1987 the worst crash since 1929. It is also indicative that George Bush, after winning an almost bloodless war against Iraq, managed to lose the Presidency because the economy was so bad.

All, with the possible exception of Eisenhower, share one trait in common: they had a very pessimistic view of the national government. The first thing almost every Republican president does upon entering office is announce massive cuts to government spending in all areas except the military. Republican philosophy maintains that individual self-interest must be paramount over public “good”, and that the public interest is best served when wealth in concentrated in a relative few private hands. To this end, they uniformly advocate a regressive tax policy that always benefits the rich to the detriment of the economy as a whole. The Republican penchant for cutting social and basic research spending actually attacks two of the basic pillars of our economy: consumer spending and technological innovation.

The single seminal event in the second half of the 20th Century was President John Kennedy’s call to place a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s. When he issued this challenge to the nation, computers were massive machines that were very limited in power. Yet, to get a man to the moon, we needed to develop small, lightweight and very powerful computers to help guide the Apollo capsules to the distant moon and back again. It was this need which gave impetus to the development of printed circuits and, ultimately, the silicon chip. This was the genesis of the computer industry that has been driving our economy for the past twenty years. The investment in the space program has, therefore, returned to our society dividends beyond anyone’s imagination.

The power of the economic engine created by the needs of the space program in the 1960s has been growing in strength over the intervening years. This economic engine often had to contend with contravening economic currents generated by the political actions of Republican presidents and politicians, but, even against these adverse trends, it burst into full (if brief) flower under the Clinton presidency of the 1990s. However, by 1998 the conservatives were strongly attacking the current prosperity as an “unsustainable bubble.” As the Presidential elections of 2000 neared, the volume and intensity of the attacks on the economy grew increasingly shrill. In the end, Bush and the Republicans sold their vision and the seeds of doubt were placed in the collective mind of America. The idea that the economy was in trouble became, in fact, a self-fulfilling prophecy. As a result, the recession, which was initially presented as potentially a “mild” correction, became increasingly severe.

It needs to be understood that the underlying strengths of the technological economic engine are still there. All of the conditions which brought about its rise are still extant. The current recession can be attributed in large part to the pessimism engendered by the Republican presidential campaign and the overly enthusiastic dampening measures taken by the Federal Reserve Board in the period 1999-2000. The climate of pessimism will not abate until we remove the Republicans from control of national policy. The first step will be to elect a Democrat controlled Congress in 2002. The second step will be to make George Bush, like his father, a one-term president. To this end, the Democrats must find a strong national candidate soon, and begin to promote that person on the national political stage. There is one person, though, who should not be considered: Al Gore. He is politically damaged goods who has had his chance and lost.

The Republicans, when installed in the White House, have presided over numerous instances of economic recession/depression. This record of economic failure can be, in large part, attributed to the pessimism inherent in Republican political philosophy. The seeds of the technology fueled economic surge of the last 30 years were sown by President John Kennedy when he challenged the nation to place a man on the moon by the end of the decade of the 1960s. This nascent economic boom burst into brief flower during the latter half of the 1990s, but the Republicans worked tirelessly to undermine this prosperity. We are seeing the results of this effort in our current economy, and we will not be able to truly begin to repair the damage done until we replace the Republican leadership in both Congress and the White House with optimistic, activist Democrats.

One of the things I intend for this Blog is to act as a vehicle for a series of columns I want to write. I’ve been doing this (writing unpublished columns) off and on for about 25 years. I think it is time that, if I’m not ever going to be published by some “Name” newspaper, I get some of this stuff out where (maybe) others might read it. I’m going to use a newspaper column format and try to limit myself to 750-1000 words, and I’m going to try to do this at least three times a week. So, without further ado, I will proceed to my first real column.

RAIN: Radio And Internet Newsletter reports that two Washington state Congressmen have introduced legislation to exempt "Small businesses" from the recent Internet webcaster royalties imposed in June by the Librarian of Congress. This is the first time I have stumbled across this newsletter, but it seems to be a good source of information about webcasting in general. I plan to add it to my repetoire of "web sites to visit on a regular basis."

Speaking of that, my "bookmarks" file is becoming extremely unwieldy. I'm going to have to start instituting some sort of "sunset" rule which gets a link deleted if it hasn't been visited in [some-lenght-of-time].

OK, today is the day. I'm adding a whole bunch of links to Blogs I think are interesting. Of course, I've only just started dipping my toes into this broad river of Blogdom, so I could be mistaken about some of these (meaning that they really aren't that interesting at all). I think I'm going to try to organize these into some kind of order which will aid in choosing whether to visit or not.

I should note that I'm playing on the machine today instead of going out and doing triage on the flora. We had a nice rain last night here in Somerset County and I think the bushes and flowers will survive a day without attention; the lawn has already been given last rites, so, if it stages a miraculous recovery, that'll be a bonus. I'm also going to take a break from building my "natural rock" borders to all the street-side planting beds. I've already moved probably close to a ton of rock from my mother's place up in Bedminster this summer. I'm gonna take a break this weekend.

The problem is that things like the entertainment industry is, in fact, a form of monopoly. There are relatively few producers of mass entertainment and a relatively vast number of consumers. You want to get Hollywood's attention? Call a one month boycott of all movies and television shows other than news or sports broadcasts. If you could claim 60% compliance by the general public, Hollywood would feel the bite in their pocket books. Of course, it wouldn't work. It wouldn't work for two reasons. First, although a month would put a big dent in their income streams, it would not be enough to make 'em scream "uncle!" No, for that the boycott would probably have to last for at least a year. And that brings us to the second reason this would not work: I doubt that 60% of Americans would give up TV watching and/or movies for a year. We consume TV and movies relentlessly. I truly don't think the majority of Americans would give either up for the requisite time needed to bring Hollywood to its knees.

Well, the stock markets dove again today as more "bad" economic news came out. Again, it was news that owes its existence more to psychology than to actual economic fundamentals. Although, that is not quite correct. Economics is not (for all its practitioners try to make it out to be) a hard science: It is, more than anything else, smoke and mirrors, but let's not open that can of worms right now.

The can of worms I want to open is that which belongs to our "glorious leader", President Sonny-boy. I understand that he is not the brightest bulb on the tree, but I wonder if he can say "Hoover". I wonder if (in the dark of the night) he thinks about the possible comparisons that may be drawn between himself and Mr. Hoover. George Bush spent a good four years (Clinton's second term) telling the country that we should be afraid of the prosperity we were enjoying and that it was bound to end badly...and soon. Well, he got his wish -- only now he is finding that it is not as easy to rebuild the economy that he spent four years trying to trash.

Now, before people start screaming about how it is the greedy corporate executives (Enron, Worldcom, Adelphia etc.) who are to blame, I would point out that most of what they are in trouble for (other than Adlephia, which is a special case) occured in the past two years. If the economy hadn't taken a sudden turn down, Worldcom and Enron would probably still be sailing along building the Brave New World. Sure, what they did was wrong, but they did it more out of desperation and the hope that things would turn around before their house of cards got caught in the downdraft. Note that borth Enron and Worldcom depended upon their stock carrying a high valuation so that it could be used as a form of currency to fund their operations. When the declining market took their stock down, management became more and more desperate to find a way to last until the market turned...which they fully expected it to do. After all, weren't the fundamentals that fueled the original strong economy still there?

Well, yes they were! And, for that matter, they still are. What we have is an economic downturn that was manufactured almost completely out of thin air. Some day this will be a textbook case of mass psychology and manipulation of society via mass media. And it can all be laid at the feet of the conservatives.